Noel Coward and Magritte

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~edb/pipe.html- for my image of Magritte's pipe that isn't a pipe....

Below is the text I read in class about Noel Coward.....

Kristen

‘The Playboy was a Spy’: Excerpts from the Stephen Kock article in the NYT about Noel Coward’s espionage work

‘Celebrity was a wonderful cover, My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot…..a merry playboy.’

‘I learned a lot from the technical people. ‘

‘I could have made a career in espionage, except, my life’s been full enough of intrigue as it is.’

The ideas was to use his public personality- the merry playboy- the ‘don’t ask/don’t tell’ gay celebrity- as a mask for his passionate antifascism.

‘We have nothing to worry about but the destruction of civilization.’

‘I wanted to prove integrity to myself ‘

Perhaps a lifetime of concealing his own private life gave him a knack for the clandestine.

‘I was the perfect silly ass. Nobody considered I had a sensible thought in my head and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.’

It was Robert Vansittart, senior diplomat, who spotted how to use Coward’s flamboyance, intelligence and flawless memory to help lend an unofficial, off-the-books anti-Nazi intelligence network he had set up across Europe.

Coward failed to fool the Nazis. He was soon on the Gestapo’s list of people to be ‘liquidated’ when Britain fell.

‘I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time. ‘

‘Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy, which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time…What a monumental ass he has always been.’ (on Windsor)

‘I had a gnawing suspicion that there was something about me he didn’t like’ (on Churchill)

In 1940 he kept the White House in stitches singing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishman” straight through, very fast, twice. Over a private nightcap, Roosevelt discussed his desire to ‘manage’ the march of events toward aid for Britain.

On an unmarked floor in a gloomy building near Victoria Station, Coward has his first meeting with ‘Intrepid’,(Sir William Stephenson, spymaster code named Intrepid) who immediately sent him back to the Americas, with a stop in Hollywood.

How important was Coward’s work? In 1941, Intrepid was sufficiently impressed to propose Coward for a still mysterious job requiring approval from the top. The answer, from Churchill, was ‘no’.

‘With me, everything always turns out for the best, because I am bloody determined that it shall. ‘(his response at being turned down).

A week later, he sat down and wrote Blythe Spirit in five days. It kept Londoners laughing for the rest of the war.